Are the Dodgers Ruining Baseball?

In a word? No. The Los Angeles Dodgers are not ruining baseball, despite what you might be hearing from everyone who likes baseball in your orbit. Yankees fans, yes, I am looking at you. But I’m also looking at fans of the other 28 teams who feel sick to their stomach over the Dodgers 2024 World Series victory and their recent signing of free-agent pitcher and recent Cy Young Award winner, Blake Snell.

This article is a little bit of a rejoinder to the last article I wrote over a month ago (whoops! I was applying for law school, but we are so back baby) about the Chicago White Sox’s abysmal 2024. We looked at, and made fun of, a team that is terrible and has no intention to change that. Now, let’s look at a team that has dedicated itself to beating the snot out of the other 29 teams and talk about why we should be celebrating the Dodgers, not denigrating them. This is not a “they hate us, ‘cause they ain’t us” issue that often befalls the incumbent champion of any season—except for the 2019 Nationals, the 2023 Rangers, and a few other champions that no one has taken seriously—this is a fundamental misunderstanding of who has the best intention of their fans on their mind.

To start, we should revel in the 2024 Dodgers season, a tour de force brought to you by a team full of some of the best and most fun baseball players I have ever had the pleasure of watching. The chart below should look kind of familiar to those of you who have been reading this blog regularly (shoutout to all four of you guys, y’all make my day). This chart shows the Wins Above Replacement (WAR) accumulated by all 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams in the 2024 season. WAR, as a reminder, is a statistic that estimates the value each player contributes compared to their team over the most readily available replacement player (considered to be a high-level minor leaguer, or bottom-of-the-barrel major league talent). Basically, if you are a “replacement-level” player, you are easily replaceable by your team. 0-1 WAR is a bench player, 2-3 WAR is an average starter, 3-4 WAR is a good baseball player, 4-5 WAR is an All-Star, 5-6 WAR is a great player, and 6+ WAR is among the best players in baseball. This year, 11 players earned 6 or more WAR. As for team WAR, this is a cumulative effort, taking into account all of the WAR that everyone who played for the team accumulated. This year, the Dodgers led the pack with 39.6 WAR, 5.6 WAR ahead of the second-place Arizona Diamondbacks, and 46.3 WAR ahead of the last-place Chicago White Sox.

How did they accumulate all of this WAR? Well it was truly a team effort, eight of their players turned in seasons that were average or above. Only five of their position players accounted for less than 0 WAR, and combined they only amassed -1 total WAR. A mark that was bested by 3 INDIVIDUAL players on the 2024 White Sox. But what the Dodgers truly benefit from is an embarrassment of top-end talent. 7 of their players put up over 3 WAR, which means that about a third of their offensive roster was above average. Those seven players were Max Muncy, Miguel Rojas, Will Smith, Teoscar Hernandez, Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, and Shohei Ohtani. I want to talk about the last three names, who were also the best three on the team this season. Each of them has an argument of being some of the best players ever, and Shohei Ohtani—in the humble opinion of this blogger—is the best player to have ever lived.

Let’s start with Freddie Freeman. He’s your favorite baseball player’s favorite baseball player. Aside from having one of the best smiles in the game, he is just one of the best dudes in baseball. He joined the Dodgers in the 2021 offseason, signing a 6-year, $162 million deal. In his career, he has amassed 60.7 WAR in just 15 MLB seasons. That makes him the 14th-best primary first basemen in the history of the game. He’s an MVP, a two-time World Series Champion, and a sure bet to make the Hall of Fame. He has persevered through tragedy, having lost his mother to cancer when he was just 10, and having seen his son, Max, hospitalized with Guillain-Barre syndrome which resulted in paralysis earlier this year. He missed 15 games this year between his son’s illness and a severe ankle sprain suffered at the end of the 2024 season. His 4.7 WAR would have been 5.2 had he played a full 162 games season. He also absolutely mashed in the postseason, setting a record for most consecutive World Series games with a home run, including this absolute missile of a walk-off grand slam (sorry, Dad!).

Now onto my second favorite player in baseball, Marcus Allen “Mookie” Betts. Mookie Betts WAS my favorite player for most of my teenage years. He was the right fielder for the Boston Red Sox until I was 20, which was also my favorite team until I was 20. His departure in a trade is the reason that I am no longer a fan of any MLB team, simply because I refuse to root for the interests of billionaires over the players that make the game as fun as it is. I digress, Mookie Betts is one of the best outfielders in all of baseball. An MVP winner in 2018 and a six-time Gold Glove winner, he has long been considered to be one of the best defenders in the game—to say nothing of his exceptional bat. So he must have had a great season in right field for the Dodgers this year, right Max? Right? Right?! WRONG! Mookie Betts was primarily a shortstop for the Dodgers! He played 65 games at short, 18 at second, and 43 in right. If you’re good enough to do that math in your head, then this sentence doesn’t matter to you, but that is just 115 total games. Mookie Betts started just 115 games this year, appearing in 116, and still managed 4.8 WAR. Over a full 162 game season, that’s 6.7 WAR. However, before his June 16 injury, Betts was on pace for 7.5 WAR. Playing a position that he had played just 16 times in MLB prior to 2024, Betts was on an MVP pace. He also made some slick plays playing positions that were new to him at the highest level of the game.

Shohei, Shohei, Shohei. If you know me, you know that I LOVE talking about Shohei Ohtani. While he is deserving of a blog post of his own—and he will get one—I’m going to try my best to keep things brief here. In 2024, Shohei Ohtani—the greatest baseball player EVER—put up 9.2 WAR and won the National League MVP. That is the BEST primary Designated Hitter season ever. To get a little weedy with y’all, Designated Hitters pay a price on their WAR for not playing the field. Positions like shortstop, center field, and catcher are considered premium defensive positions and are given additional WAR to account for the reality that they are defense-first positions. As an offense-ONLY position, DHs are penalized for not playing the field. And with this penalty, Shohei Ohtani had the third-best season in the league in 2024. Why is that a big deal? Well, Shohei Ohtani is not normally only a DH, he is usually ALSO a pitcher! He normally does something that no other baseball player has ever done. He is a top 5 hitter and a top 5 pitcher in the game when he is healthy. No one, not Babe Ruth or any other player, has managed that level of two-sided production in the history of the game. He is singular. He is the best. This season, Shohei did something that only five other players in the history of baseball have managed to do: record a 40/40 season. This feat refers to a 40 homerun, 40 stolen base season, and is considered to be an extremely rare feat of speed and power. Usually, good homerun hitters do not steal bases. Usually, good base stealers do not hit home runs. But Shohei didn’t JUST do something that has only been done five other times in the history of baseball. He did something that no other player has ever done. He is the founding member of the 50/50 club. Swatting 54 homers while swiping 59 bags.

Of players who have hit at least 50 home runs in one season, Shohei has 35 more stolen bases than second place—occupied by Willie Mays, who is one of the only players I would ever consider as challenging Shohei for the GOAT title.

Of players that have stolen at least 50 bases in one season, Shohei has 13 more home runs than second place Ronald Acuna Jr. (who is one of the other five 40/40 players).

Okay, so the Dodgers have a bunch of great players, and? And they have paid handsomely to acquire these players. Of the three players that I mentioned at length in this article, all three of them made their MLB debut with a different team. The Dodgers traded for, and signed, these three MVPs. That is something the Dodgers have done better than any other team in baseball—they have gone out and signed or traded for the best players in baseball. Last offseason, they committed over $1 billion to Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto ($700 million of which is going to retain the talent of the best player who has ever lived). They are paying six players in excess of $27 million per year. 10 players are getting over $10 million next year. That includes pitcher Blake Snell, who they signed to a five year, $182 million contract on Tuesday, November 28. This sent baseball fans over the edge, complaining that the Dodgers are “buying wins,” or “paying for a championship.” To that, I genuinely ask “So what?”

Arguing that what the Dodgers are doing is wrong is to say that billionaires should hoard their money to artificially dampen salaries. The Dodgers are simply paying the market value for talent, if you don’t like it, don’t be mad at the Dodgers, be mad at YOUR TEAM’S OWNER. Let’s pretend, for a moment, that your best friend at work is offered a massive raise to go to another company to do the same job they do now after trying to negotiate with their current employer for a better salary. You wouldn’t blame your friend for leaving, I’m sure you would leave for a better salary to do the same job too! Would you blame the company that offered them more money than your current employer? That also seems far-fetched. You’d probably think “Dang, I would also love to work for that company.” The ones who deserve blame in this hypothetical are your current employer, who was unwilling to pay market rate for your friend’s labor.

By turning our collective fan-angst on the Dodgers, we are saying that what we need is corporate socialism. We are collectively blaming the Dodgers for awarding laborers with a closer estimation of their value than any of the other 29 teams are willing to offer. In truth, every single major league baseball player is underpaid relative to the value that they create for their employer. You are too, that’s how profit is made. That the Dodgers are more generous than the other teams is something that should be celebrated, more money for laborers is a good thing. It is something that we should all strive for. The Dodgers are better at passing surplus value to their employees than the other 29 teams, it is that simple. They are the example that every team should follow. “Well why don’t they?” you might be asking. And that is a fair question. Why don’t other teams do what the Dodgers do? Is it because they can’t afford it? No, it is not because they can’t afford it. Would you believe it if a billionaire told you that they could not afford a $250 million annual expense from their company that  earns, on average $378 million a year? They can’t afford a $128 million profit? That sounds dubious. That is to say nothing of the gradual increase in value that each team accrues every year, which has currently reached an average of $2.4 billion per team.

If you’re worried that the Dodgers are ruining baseball, you’re worried about the wrong thing. The people that own your favorite team can make your team better. Just as billionaires in the United States can afford to pay their fair share in taxes. It is the fault of decision makers far more powerful than any of us that billionaires are able to hoard their wealth in ways that continue to stratify society. Some billionaires are more willing to part with their dollars than other, contributing in a small way to the wealth transfer that our nation—and the world—so desperately needs. Those billionaires should be publicly encouraged and heralded. Those who bend the system to their wants are the ones we should vilify. If we don’t, they’ll get so used to our indifference—or praise—that they might run for President or try and cut the federal budget to a point where only they can afford to employ people, ensuring a cheap and desperate labor force where wages are depressed to the point where we can barely afford anything but the goods that the capitalist overlords produce.

The Dodgers are a capitalist organization. For that, they deserve blame. But they are the best example of capitalism available in the context of MLB teams. So let’s celebrate the Dodgers. While the rest of capitalism death-rattles its way through the second Trump Presidency, the Dodgers can be a fun escape for those of us unfortunate enough to have to deal with this bullshit.

The Woeful White Sox

Off the bat (pun intended), I would just like to say “thank you” to each of you that takes the time to read these pieces in part or in their entirety. I do love writing about baseball, and will continue to even when all four of you stop reading, but to those of you who text me or talk to me about what I write—it makes my day every single time. So again, and a million times over, thank you for supporting my little blog. Now, let’s get into the baseball.

As I am writing this, the Yankees and Dodgers have punched their tickets to the World Series, and Game 1 is tomorrow night. This postseason has already  been one of the best that I can remember (and if you want to live through some of the games with me, you can follow me on Twitter @abaseballblog, I will definitely follow you back) and we are getting a matchup of the two best teams in MLB. Four of the ten best players in the game will all be on the biggest stage, representing the two teams with the biggest fanbases who have spent the most money to be the best. This is what every baseball fan should want. If you’re upset that your team didn’t spend as much as the Yankees or the Dodgers and you feel like that’s unfair, just remember that the billionaire that owns your team could spend as much as the Yankees and the Dodgers—and probably more—but they choose not to. And in honor of some of the best baseball of the year, I want to contextualize some of it for y’all by taking a look back at the single worst season of baseball that has happened in my lifetime.

Since 1998, the worst team in baseball, and one of the worst teams of all time, is the 2024 Chicago White Sox. That’s right! One of the worst teams of all time was playing baseball a month ago! And this team was not just regular bad, they were truly historically awful. In this article, we are only going to be looking at their offensive statistics, because they were truly abysmal. For the purposes of evaluating just how bad they are, I’m going to begin with a statistic called “WAR.” For those of you with regular lives and hobbies, WAR stands for “Wins Above Replacement” and is a basic value measure of a baseball player that takes into account their contributions offensively and defensively. In other words, the number of additional wins a team would accrue with a player over that of a replacement-level player, defined as a player who a team can add with minimal effort or cost. A general scale for understanding the statistic: negative WAR is very bad, 0-1 WAR is a bench player, 1-2 WAR is a below average regular, 2-3 WAR is an average starter, 3-4 WAR is a good player, 4-5 WAR is an All-Star, 5-6 WAR is a fantastic season, 6+ WAR is someone who might be among the top players in baseball. This year, just 11 players earned 6 or more WAR according to Baseball Reference and only 7 players accrued between 5 and 6 WAR.

One important thing to consider with WAR is that it is a counting statistic, meaning the more games you play, the more likely it is that your WAR will be higher than a player who doesn’t play as many games. Every game gives you additional chances to add or subtract value for your team. Of the 739 position players (non-pitchers) who accrued WAR this season, the lowest was Brandon Drury, who amassed -2 WAR in just 97 games for the Angels (which is its own impressive level of suck) and the highest was Aaron Judge, who amassed a whopping 10.8 WAR—an insane level of production. The most average player in MLB this year? Jake Cronenworth, who gave the Padres 2 WAR in 155 of 162 games. As for teams, the Dodgers led the pack with 39.6 WAR (thanks in large part to my favorite player, Shohei Ohtani and his 9.2 WAR) and you already know who was in last, the Chicago White Sox.

In 2024, the Chicago White Sox were the only team to produce negative WAR. They ended up with -6.8 WAR on their way to lose an unfathomable 141 games. Their final record on the year was 21 wins and 141 losses. For those of you who aren’t into baseball, there is a rule of thumb that every team will win 50 games, and every team will lose 50 games, it’s the other 62 that will decide whether you’re a good team or not. Did that rule hold up this year? Well, the next worst team, the Colorado Rockies lost just 101 games. 40 fewer games than the 2024 White Sox. The best team in baseball, the Los Angeles Dodgers, won 98 games this year. The gap between the White Sox and the Rockies (40 games) is larger than the gap between the Rockies and the Dodgers (37 games). Yes, you read that right. The difference between the best team and the second-worst team is SMALLER than the gap between the second-worst team and the worst team. The chart below shows the losses for every team this year, and the White Sox stick out like a sore thumb. If the 2024 season were analogous to a science experiment, the White Sox sucked so bad that we now have to rethink physics. Time stopped, gravity turned off, and the world stopped spinning.

Over their 162 game season, the White Sox averaged 3.1 runs per game. The next worst was the Tampa Bay Rays, who averaged 3.7 runs per game. But over the course of the season, that allowed the Rays to go 80-82. They won 59 more games than the White Sox. To achieve this level of awful, the entire roster had to do a lot of work to be so bad. The most valuable player on their team by WAR was Luis Robert Jr., a 26-year old outfielder who played just 100 games and produced 1.4 WAR. If he had played all 162 games and kept that pace, he would have produced about 2.3 WAR. If the best player on the White Sox played a full season, he would have been average. Every. Single. Other. Player. Produced less than 1 WAR. Take a look:

Of the 28 position players that appeared for the White Sox this year, just 12 of them managed to produce more than 0 WAR.  That is awful. Remember 0 WAR represents a player that a team can pick up off of the scrap heap. The White Sox managed to turn in 16 different players who wouldn’t even belong at the top of the scrap heap. Oh, and number 25 on that list above, Andrew Benintendi, just got the biggest contract that the team has ever offered a free agent. They signed him to a five-year, $75 million contract at the beginning of 2023. Yikes. That’s a lot of money to spend on a player who puts up negative WAR.

I still feel like I haven’t quite contextualized how bad this team has been. So, let’s look at every season played by every MLB team since I’ve been alive. From 1998 until 2024, 30 teams have played 27 seasons each worth of baseball. That works out to 810 team seasons. The best team was the 2001 Seattle Mariners, they won a record 116 games with one of the most talented rosters in the history of the game. Their offense produced an incredible 50.4 WAR, over 10 wins better than the best team from this year. If you’re curious, the 2024 Dodgers are the third best team by WAR in my lifetime. Of the 810 seasons, the 2024 White Sox are the worst. Number 810 out of 810. The only team that is even in the ballpark (another pun) of suck is the 2019 Detroit Tigers, who put up -6.1 WAR on their way to lose 114 games. The third worst team, the 2010 Pittsburg Pirates, did not even manage -1 WAR. Only 5 out of the 810 teams managed to put up negative WAR over the course of a season.

Looking at this chart, it is unreal to see two things: first, oh my word the 2001 Mariners were insane; second, the tail end of that graph goes into the negatives in a profound way. When we look at just the 100 worst teams, the picture gets a little more clear, and a lot worse for the White Sox.

Even more incredibly, in THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF BASEBALL, only 128 teams have managed to produced 0 or fewer WAR. The 2024 White Sox are the 123rd team on this list. Only five teams in the history of the game have been worse than the 2024 White Sox.

This was a bad, bad year for the White Sox. And unfortunately for them, their owner is unlikely to spend in the upcoming offseason to improve the team at all. And with most bad teams, their fans can take some solace in knowing that their players are young and are likely to improve in the upcoming years. For example, the Oakland Athletics, who I wrote about for the first post of this blog, have an average age of just 26.5! That’s the fourth youngest roster in baseball. The White Sox, on the other hand, have an average age of 27.8, which puts them right in the middle of the pack of the 30 teams. This team is not going to get better, and with the fourth worst attendance in baseball this year, their management group isn’t going to be spending a lot of money.

For those of you who want to see how bad this team has been, here’s a great video of their low-lights from this year. It’s a tough watch, but hey, at least you’re (probably) not a White Sox fan.  

Bullsh*t Bullpen Management?

Author’s Note: This is what many in the baseball writing industry call #GoryMath, it is inelegant, it is imperfect, but for the purposes of this piece, it’s good enough.

This piece is the first one that I’m doing about something that is currently happening in MLB. It is largely inspired by conversations I’ve been having with one of my real life friends about his favorite baseball team, the Cleveland Guardians. They are in the midst of their first meaningful playoff run since Barack Obama was President. I share the opinion of one of my favorite podcast hosts, Meg Rowley, who has stipulated—jokingly—that when the Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series against the Cleveland Guardians, snapping their 108-year World Series drought, the Cubs opened up a rupture in our timeline that allowed for the election of Donald Trump and the ensuing chaos. If the Cubs could win, anything was possible.

Anyway, tonight (October 17), they will be facing off in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series against the New York Yankees. The Yankees currently boast a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven-series to decide who will go to the World Series. One theme that my friend and I have discussed throughout the Guardians run in the 2024 Postseason, including this series against the Yankees, has been their pitching usage. Their manager, Stephen Vogt, is in his first season as Manager of the club, and was playing Major League Baseball just two years ago. While there has been a trend lately of hiring young former ballplayers to manage teams, Vogt is exceptionally green for the role, having just one season of coaching experience between his career as a player ending and his role as skipper beginning. I, personally, do believe that the Guardians did better at hewing to the Selig Rule than the other hirings I wrote about last Sunday—for what it’s worth.

Now, it is important to have some context for this discussion before we get into the math of it all. In baseball, it is common practice to have two different roles assigned to your pitchers: starters and relievers. Starters do just what their name implies, they are the pitcher who begins the game on the mound for their team. It is expected that starters will pitch a majority of the team’s innings for that game. Relievers, on the other hand, hang out in the bullpen until they are needed to relieve the starter—you can see where their name comes from—due to fatigue, performance, or because the manager believes the relievers will be better against the upcoming batters than the starter. In baseball, at all levels, familiarity builds each time a batter faces a pitcher, so the more times a starter pitches to the same batter, the better one can expect the outcomes to be against the starter. Often, this effect is most apparent the third time through the batting order, which can occur at any point during the game depending on how many baserunners and runs the pitcher allows. The more baserunners and runs, the worse the pitcher is performing. Okay, basics are pretty much out of the way. Now we can get into it.

My friend and I text each other during Guardians games, and while I am not a Guards fan, I can appreciate the pain that he feels when things aren’t going well for his squad. One of the most frustrating things that can happen to a baseball fan, is an unforced error by the manager, and this manifests most predominantly in two ways, leaving a pitcher in too long, and taking a pitcher out too quickly. These decisions often happen on the margins and are much easier to see in hindsight, however, with Stephen Vogt this year, it has been incredibly obvious that he has a very quick hook with his starting pitchers. Last night I pulled some data from Stathead (pronounced “Stat Head”) to see if I could confirm what we were feeling watching the games. And I cannot believe what I ended up finding.

So far, in the 2024 MLB Postseason, starting pitchers are averaging just under 5 innings pitched (IP) per game—compared to about 5 and 1/3 innings during the regular season. However, Cleveland’s pitchers are averaging about 3 innings per game during the postseason! That is not good! That is very bad! For context, during the regular season, out of the 4858 player games started by a pitcher this year, 4426 games saw the starting pitchers go deeper into games than the Guardians’ starting pitching has this postseason. That puts the Cleveland starting pitchers in the bottom 8.9% of pitchers. Yikes. This is mainly an issue because it puts an undue amount of stress on the relievers on the Guardians, they are being asked to pitch way more innings than relievers on any other team. In terms of percentages, Cleveland’s starting pitching has lasted 30% less into games than the average team’s starting pitchers this postseason. They also pitched less than the average team during the regular season, but that difference was just 5%.

The graph above is a snapshot comparing the average team in the regular season and the average team this postseason to Cleveland’s pitching in the postseason and the regular season. You can see that in the postseason, the difference in innings is much larger than it was during the regular season. Otherwise, everything else looks about as you would expect. Where Cleveland was worse during the regular season, they have been worse during the postseason. But a few things stick out to me. Despite pitching 30% fewer innings and facing considerably fewer batters, Guardians pitchers are walking A TON of batters. In almost two fewer innings, they are averaging MORE walks than the rest of the postseason teams. They walked more batters than the average team during the regular season too, but only 7% more. In the postseason, that number has shot up to 11%. Below, you can see how that has impacted the WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched) of Cleveland pitchers. They are allowing baserunners at a rate 43% higher than their postseason counterparts. That is awful.

I started this article expecting to confirm my assumption that Vogt was too quick to pull his pitchers. After looking at the numbers, I can’t blame him. I like this team, I do. Vogt is an easy manager to root for, the team is full of young players that have skills that aren’t found on many teams. Watching them play is really fun, watching them pitch is really not. I thought I could blame Vogt for being an over-zealous manager, too eager to treat every game as if it were a must-win. But it turns out, his pitching staff—or at least his starting pitchers—have been pretty bad. Stephen Vogt, I’m sorry, you are not the problem. Your roster is.

MLB’s Diversity Problem: Part I, The Baseball Bourgeoisie

Just a few of the greedy men, hell-bent on ruining the game. 

I wasn’t planning on writing this piece until the offseason, especially given the majority of every baseball fan’s attention currently being expended on the playoffs but given the recent hirings of both Buster Posey and Terry Francona, now is as good a time as any. Last week I wrote about the self-inflicted advertising debacle that MLB created for itself and made reference to the reality that most of MLB’s biggest problems are caused by MLB itself. By “MLB” I mean the league in its entirety, an all-encompassing entity that includes the MLB League Office, the owners of the teams, and their front-office personnel. Effectively everyone that runs the league and the teams, “management” in other terms (or “the baseball bourgeoisie” if you prefer a more Marxist lens). This blog, like many that I hope to write, will hopefully show the three of you that read this exactly what I meant about baseball being a backdrop through which we can examine all of the socio-economic struggles that the United States has gone through and continues to go through. Each and every fight for equality, civil rights, and progress has played out in a much smaller way through the game of baseball.

Left, Farhan Zaidi. Right, Buster Posey. 

Over the last week or so, this fight for equality played out in the two biggest personnel moves so far since the end of the season. The San Francisco Giants replaced long-time President of Baseball Operations (think CEO) Farhan Zaidi with their former face-of-the-franchise, future Hall of Fame catcher (and MVP, Rookie of the Year, and three-time World Series Champion), Buster Posey. This was followed in short order by the Cincinnati Reds hiring Terry Francona (also a probably Hall of Famer and two-time World Series Champion, though all as a manager) to replace their recently canned skipper, David Bell. In the case of the Giants, they replaced the first Muslim, first Pakistani-American, and first South-Asian American general manager/President of Baseball Operations (POBO) with a white man. Zaidi has degrees from MIT and UC Berkley and was widely respected as one of the best front office executives in baseball. He was replaced by Buster Posey, who is one of my favorite players of all time, but his qualifications are that he played baseball. That is a very old-school approach to the role of POBO, one that goes against the grain in the wrong way. Baseball is not a game of insiders anymore, POBOs are expected to be well versed in analytics, statistics, probability, finance, and business operations. The latter hiring was more of a one-for-one white-guy-for-white-guy hiring. Baseball managers are, unlike POBOs, still expected to be old-school baseball guys—former players who are a little more cerebral than your average ballplayer, but not an economist or financier by trade. They are the ones in the clubhouse responsible for wrangling 26 man-children, it is expected that they have spent considerable time around the game.  But even that convention is now falling to the wayside, as Alyssa Nakken has been a regular coach for the Giants for the past few years.

Alyssa Nakken

These promotions are a big deal for two major reasons. The first is that baseball does have a massive diversity problem outside of the player pool. There have been very few executives and managers that are not white and there has only been one executive that wasn’t a man (and one coach who, oddly enough, is part of the Giants’ coaching staff). That is not to say that there aren’t many highly qualified applicants for these jobs. Just last year, the inventor of the high-five (yes, really) and the most successful Black manager in baseball history, Dusty Baker, finally called it quits after a Hall of Fame managing career. Kim Ng, the first female executive of a modern MLB team, was an incredibly successful MLB executive, winning three World Series in the front office of the New York Yankees after helping build their dynasty in the late 1990s. After years of being something of a token interviewee for many teams, she was given the chance to take the reins as GM of the Miami Marlins in 2020. After leading one of the worst teams in baseball to a playoff berth in just her third season—a remarkable turnaround—the Marlins sought to demote her and Ng left the team as a result. And before baseball was (re)integrated, Effa Manley, a Black woman, was a prominent co-owner and executive of the Newark Eagles (a Negro League team). Manley used her positions as co-owner of the team, Treasurer of the Negro National League, and Treasurer of the NAACP to further civil rights and players’ rights. She encouraged and facilitated boycotts in New York to fight segregation, but also worked ardently to ensure that her players were paid well, traveled comfortably, and fought hard to win contemporary recognition of the Negro Leagues as a haven for baseball. But baseball’s bourgeoise has maintained a very white, very male façade and continues to perpetuate an “Old Boys Club” when hiring is concerned. The second problem is that over two decades ago, in 1999, baseball tried to address this problem with something called “the Selig Rule.” Named after the only MLB Commissioner in my lifetime who actually enjoyed the sport of baseball (fight me, Rob Manfred, I dare you), the Selig Rule requires every club to consider minority candidates “for all general manager, assistant general manager, field manager, director of player development, and director of scouting positions,” for the purpose of POBO positions, the Selig rule also applies. In 2021, after two decades of this rule doing almost nothing to meaningfully diversify the upper levels of baseball management, MLB made several changes to the rule that stipulated:

• Any club making internal promotions for a senior baseball operations position must provide the Commissioner’s Office with a succession plan for all of the club’s senior baseball operations positions, requiring the club to include diverse individuals for future leadership positions.

• In the event of a non-diverse internal promotion, it is the expectation of the Commissioner that a diverse individual will be promoted, or hired, to a vacancy created by the position.

• A club must provide the Office of the Commissioner with notice of the internal promotion and the rationale for not conducting an external or internal review process.

Recent hirings, however, have—to quote Jeff Passan, the most well-respected reporter in the game—“hand(ed) important jobs to novice candidates while the commissioner’s office continues to rubber-stamp a systematic snuffing-out of minorities.” While Tito Francona is far from a novice candidate, the Cincinnati Reds—with their own troubling history of racism—seemingly allowed for an open position to be filled without any serious consideration or interview process of any candidates. There was no opportunity for minority candidates to apply, to be given a chance to manage this team. They hand-picked a white guy to replace another white guy and closed the books on the hiring process. This flouts the Selig Rule in spirit and literally. But will the League do anything about it? No. No they will not. Just as they will do nothing to remedy the situation in San Francisco, where a minority POBO was replaced by a white guy with zero experience in the role without interviewing another candidate. Buster Posey was a fantastic baseball player, but he has not had so much as an internship in the front office of any team. The Selig Rule is a sham, MLB has projected itself as a bastion of progressivism and equality for decades while doing quite the opposite right in front of our faces. MLB will, rightfully, celebrate Jackie Robinson Day every year, and will certainly continue to award the Roberto Clemente Award and the Hank Aaron award. But their embrace of those men and their legacies are celebrated against a backdrop that their presence in the game was only begrudgingly accepted at best, though many in the game actively opposed their inclusion even years after their careers ended. If you doubt that contention, you should visit the Wikipedia page of Marge Schott, who was allowed to own the Cincinnati Reds (one of the teams whose hiring decisions preempted this article) until 1999 despite being a racist, Nazi-sympathizer. She only sold the team after her second suspension from MLB following her public praise of Adolf Hitler. That might sound like a joke, but it is not.

Effa Manley. 

Baseball, like the United States, has a long and profound history of racism and sexism. Like the United States, neither story is complete—or really, even close to their end. Racism and sexism remain alive and well in both contexts. Baseball has an uncanny ability to reflect the narratives that exist within the broader American experience. We are currently in the midst of the third Presidential election in my lifetime that has been dubbed “The Most Important Election in American History” and a ticket of white supremacists—who have praised avowed racists while demonizing Black and brown people and promising to complete their crusade of stripping rights from women (and really everyone who is not a cisgender, straight, white man)—is facing off against a Black woman. The intentional preservation of white supremacy in our politics and our sports will eventually lead to the crumbling of our institutions. The United States Senate is a group of old, white, wealthy men who have proved time and time again that they are concerned not with the people that they are elected to represent, but with their own bank accounts and the financial interest of their billionaire donors. They have enabled the man who has brought the United States to the brink of authoritarian rule and lack the courage to do what is right.

In this analogy, Rob Manfred is the President overseeing a Senate made up of the old, white, wealthy men who will do everything they can to preserve their perch atop society. Including ensuring those without power remain without power. The American political system and MLB have intentionally kept minorities and women out of any positions of even relative power. To the extent that those opportunities have been extended, they have seen the tokenization of human beings for the purpose of pretending that we value equality.

I’m sure some of you will claim that I am asserting that every open position must be remedied by a “diversity hire.” That is not what I am saying at all. What I am saying is that there needs to be a meaningful level of equality as a legitimate goal of our institutions. When the people at the top are predominantly one race, one gender, and one sexual orientation, we will necessarily preserve the subjugation of those who do not meet those demographic requirements. Any facet of society that counts among its principles the eschewing of diversity in favor of discrimination should be viewed as antithetical to the mission of our experience as humans, let alone as our shared experience as Americans.

I hate you, Rob Manfred. I really do. 

If baseball, and the United States, are to become healthy, functioning institutions (because by any definition, neither can currently be called “healthy”), the recognition and alleviation of the current states of inequality are of the utmost import. In my wildest dreams, baseball is a game that welcomes everyone, and America is a country that truly lives up to the values that we claim to profess. Until that day, we must point out when our leaders and the guardians of our institutions do not live up to the promises that they have made to us and the promises that undergird our collective expectations of them. Just as we should all be righteously furious at the lack of diversity in a political system that professes to be representative of our melting-pot of a nation, we should be upset with MLB for lying to our faces about their own efforts to increase diversity (though to a significantly lesser extent than the example about our political system). This will not be the last time I address the issue of diversity in MLB. I plan to write two more pieces, addressing the decreasing diversity of the professional player population, and a third addressing the same trend in amateur baseball.

Ad Nausea (Pun Intended): MLB’s Advertising Nightmare

MLB has a serious problem. Well, it has many serious problems. An unfathomable percentage of which are self-inflicted. The ever-encroaching ad-pocalypse is primary amongst them. The blight and constant bombardment of advertisements detracts from what I believe to be one of the sport’s unique qualities amongst its peers in American professional sports: its dynamism in aesthetic storytelling.

MLB is—in my experience as a sports fan—unique in that the dimensions of its playing surface necessitates multiple camera angles to depict the action on the field. In football, basketball, soccer, tennis, and even NASCAR, the predominant shot during the live action is from a static angle placed at the half-way point of the playing surface—the 50-yard line, half-court, mid-field, the net, or just the halfway point on one of the ovular racetracks in NASCAR. Baseball is dependent on multiple angles to show the viewer any at-bat that produces a ball in play. This at bat by the Mets 24-year-old catcher Francisco Alvarez in the top of the fifth inning is an excellent example.

We start with a shot of the pitcher, rookie Tobias Myers. It’s a close up, showing him peeking over his left shoulder to make sure the runner on first isn’t taking too liberal of a lead. Then the broadcast cuts to the centerfield camera, the foundation of every play in the game. Myers uncorks a fastball to Alvarez who fouls the ball up and over the backstop and we see the broadcast cut again to a camera above home plate to show you just where the ball went. We’re one pitch into the at bat and already have seen three different camera angles. From there, we see a fourth angle in between pitches, showing Alvarez readjusting his helmet and readying himself for the next pitch. Before Myers delivers the next pitch, back to the center field angle, and another foul ball tracked up and over the backstop by the high-home-plate camera. Then another new cut to a closeup of Brewers backstop Gary Sanchez, mask off, flipping a new ball back to Myers. In these closeup shots, MLB’s broadcast does not put overlay ads onto the backstop, there is no interruption of what you are seeing, and it looks good! It’s smooth, there is no visual noise to sort through as a viewer. We then get two more cuts in quick succession, one of Myers walking back on the mound thinking of how to approach the potential put-away pitch, then to Alvarez in a closeup showing his consideration of what the strategy might be from the pitcher. Then the broadcast brings the fans in to show the audience that this is a big pitch, and another cut to a beautiful wide shot showing the pitcher, batter, catcher, and the fans on their feet. The broadcast continues to play with shots to build narrative tension until Alvarez pops out to the first baseman. But in this one at bat, you can see how important the aesthetic variety of camera angles is to the narration of a baseball game.

Of course, the other sports rely on multiple camera angles for replays or narrative single-player shots, but baseball is the only major sport so dependent on multiple cameras and quick cuts between them. The only other sport I can think of that needs multiple cameras in order to see all of the action is golf, but that sport still sees long, static shots that allow the action to play itself out. While each pitch in baseball begins with the centerfield camera, any contact will see a camera change. For example, here’s a still frame from the first pitch of the Mets Brewers Wild Card Game 3 from October 3.

This is never the only camera angle you get in baseball, but it is the one that you will see the most, as exemplified by the Alvarez at bat above. Since Francisco Lindor, a switch hitter, is batting from the left side in this plate appearance, there is nothing immediately objectionable in this shot. You may, however, notice that there is a lot of advertising going on in this shot. There are three separate ads behind him, the catcher, and the umpire, all for T-Mobile. And that is before you include the Brewers’ home field sponsor, American Family Insurance. MLB also sneaks in an ad for their Play Ball initiative, which is the only behind-the-plate ad that I have no objections over. T-Mobile is actually advertised on your screen a fourth time if you include the watermark on the mound. I get it! You want me to switch to T-Mobile! But I want to watch a baseball game! We already have commercial breaks between the half innings where people yell at me about dog food, erectile disfunction pills, hair loss pills, and nutrition supplements—not to mention the deluge of political ads this time of year. This season is also the first in which MLB is including batting helmet sponsors as part of every post-season game. They are not there during the 162-game regular season, only during the most-viewed games of the year. MLB has also added corporate sponsorships to their jerseys as well, though I have less to say about these as I am also a fan of European football, and all of their professional leagues have nearly full coverage ads.

The still image of Lindor, above, is fine with me. I have grown up in a baseball ecosystem that has long since ceded most of the available stadium real estate to advertising. That’s fine, that isn’t going to change anytime soon, and if it did, I’m positive that owners would use it as an excuse to increase their already-extortion-level prices for tickets. My problem is when it interrupts your ability to actually watch the game. What do I mean by that? Here’s an at bat from Brewers rookie phenom Jackson Chourio. This at bat isn’t all that important, but it will show you how MLB has compromised its aesthetic brilliance to force ads down your throat whenever they can. Pay attention to Chourio’s sliding glove in his back pocket as well as his bat, arms, and hands. You can clearly see the “Sage” advertisement which has been digitally overlayed on the backstop distorting the visual integrity of the broadcast. When they cut to a close up, you can see how different it is when there is no ad overlay. But when they go back to the center field camera, ever bat waggle creates visual distortion. I slowed down part of the video where you can see Chourio’s bat disappear in his hands, showing the backstop without the Sage overlay.

MLB has a much bigger problem that at bats in the bottom of the third inning though. The biggest moment of the game, and of the playoffs so far, has also been tainted by this desire to monetize every second of the game. Down 2-0, facing one of the best relievers in the game, a struggling Pete Alonso came to the plate with two on and the chance to open up scoring for the Mets in their last at-bats of the game. After working the count to 3-1, Alonso ripped an opposite field home run for the Mets first runs of the game, putting them ahead of the Brewers and eventually being the game-winning at-bat for the Mets. While they tacked on another run in the inning to go up 4-2, the three runs delivered but this swing from the Polar Bear was all the Mets needed.

You can see very clearly that the video is distorted. Around the catcher, umpire, and Pete Alonso, MLB’s own advertisement for the product that you are currently watching ruins the aesthetic value of the moment. Why? What are you gaining by showing me an advertisement for the product that I’m watching? If I’m seeing the ad, I am obviously sold on the product. This could very well be Alonso’s final year with the Mets, capping off a six year run as one of the most dominant first baseman in the game, seeing him win a Rookie of the Year Award en route to four All-Star appearances and cult-like dedication from the Mets faithful. With all of that being said, this was the biggest moment of his career. Sure, he’s won a few Home Run Derbies, but this is his first appearance in the playoffs, and the star became the savior.

The distortion in one at-bat doesn’t seem like much, but this happens in every single at bat. Pitches, bats, arms, and legs disappear from view at the beginning of every play. If you were watching the NBA Playoffs and a Steph Curry three disappeared midway to its target and you were left to fill in the blank as to how the shot finished, the broadcast would be rightfully panned as a failure. It’s distracting at best and compromising at worst. Baseball, as was mentioned to me by one of the readers of this blog who is one of my close friends, is a very technical, mechanical game. Seeing how the batter orients himself before a swing and how he executes his mechanics is what separates this incredible at bat from Alonso from one of these ugly swings from Javier Baez.

MLB also employs a much more intrusive form of mid-plate-appearance advertising though. In the top of the sixth inning, following a Mark Vientos strikeout, cutting away from a shot meant to build tension in a tied playoff game, the broadcast minimizes itself in favor of another Sage advertisement, it’s baseball themed, sure, but there is also literally a baseball game happening in a much smaller screen pushed aside for the product that MLB apparently cares more about than its own, that of its advertisers. This is not a commercial break, this is the middle of the Mets turn at the dish in the sixth, and we take 15 seconds away from the broadcast to shill for some company that probably does not impact the vast majority of the people watching. Worse still, when the broadcast cuts back to the center field camera for the first pitch of Brandon Nimmo’s plate appearance, THERE IS A SAGE ADVERTISEMENT ON THE BACKSTOP. The same company that just disrupted the broadcast already has a backstop ad. And if you remember the Jackson Chourio at-bat from earlier in this article, you’ll remember that this very same ad overlay disrupted the aesthetics of his at bat.

I’m not an idiot. I know that MLB and its broadcast partners need advertisers to deliver the product that I love so much. But for the love of god, when all I see during the broadcast is advertisements and then we get another barrage in between innings for commercial breaks, it’s exhausting. MLB has taken steps to intentionally shorten its games while boosting the presence of advertisers to an infomercial-like level. As a fan, it makes me wonder what MLB thinks of its own product. Do they care about the sport at all? My girlfriend and I sat down to watch the Ohio State v. Iowa football game on October 5, and the level of commercial interruptions or advertising displayed on the field is so much less than that which happens during a baseball game. I know that baseball isn’t as popular as football, but if this was one of the hundreds of shows about fire, EMS, police, or other rescue services that all seem to have Rob Lowe in them despite no one actually watching them, this level of advertising would be unfathomable. If every surgery in Grey’s Anatomy was brought to you by Coke, or every joke in The Office had a punchline that Jim delivered to camera about switching to T-Mobile, no one would watch. MLB has a lot of problems. But key among them is that it misunderstands its product. Baseball is an interesting sport if you take the time to explain it and allow the broadcasters the chance to build narrative tension with creative camera angles. It is not, as the league and its broadcast partners seem to think, an infomercial.

A’s Fans Deserve Better Than John Fisher

At this point, a considerable amount of ink has been spilled with respect to the Oakland—sorry—the Athletics departure from Oakland. Nearly everyone in the baseball world, from former players, to commentators, to fans, podcast hosts, and even the vaunted Jeff Passan have taken their chance to call out the cruelty and greed that permeates this decision. This is going to be a long piece, but it isn’t going to be heavy in baseball-jargon. This is going to be a discussion about how the greed that moves the kelly green to Vegas—sorry—Sacramento, has imperiled baseball as a tentpole of the American experience. To start, I know that a lot of you might have no idea what I’m talking about, so I’ll begin with a brief history of the A’s, and how this comedy of errors has played out over the last several years.

The Oakland Athletics trace their history back to the other side of the country, as they were founded as one of the original members of the American League in 1901 and called Philadelphia home until 1954. After a 14 year pit-stop in Kansas City, the A’s ended up in Oakland in 1968. It is important to note that those moves are not analogous to what is happening today. When the A’s moved from Philadelphia to Kansas City, part of that calculation involved the reality that the Philadelphia Phillies had called that city home since 1883. And when they moved from Kansas City, the Kansas City Royals replaced them in 1969. Neither city was left without baseball. Four years after arriving in Oakland, they won their first of three consecutive World Series Titles (adding another in 1989) and cemented themselves as an institution of Bay Area sports. They have long been known for having some of the most dedicated fans in the game, every A’s game I can remember watching was full of crowd shots of fans banging on drums, strumming banjos, and painted green and gold. The A’s now-former stadium, the Coliseum, is the place where the Wave was invented. Yes, the thing that every non-sports fan associates with sports games was first conceived in Oakland in 1981, by a man known as “Krazy George Henderson” who was in attendance for the last game at the Coliseum on Thursday, September 26. For the vast majority of the A’s history, and still today, this is one of the healthiest, most robust fanbases in professional sports. So where did it all go wrong?

Krazy George Henderson, the inventor of the wave. 

On June 1, 1961, John Joseph Fisher was born to Donald and Doris Fisher, the cofounders of Gap. After 43 years of being a trust fund baby and raising money for Republicans in California, his parents finally decided that it was time for this baby billionaire to have his first big responsibility. Nicknamed “Harpo” by his parents due to a propensity to harp on them until he got what he wanted, I can only imagine how uncomfortable it must have been to watch a 43 year old grovel until his parents bought him a baseball team. One of his early critics, dating back to when he used his parents’ development company to clear forests to build roads and luxury housing, quipped that “You should change the spelling from J-O-H-N to G-R-E-E-D,” which turned out to be more of a prophecy than he could have imagined.

Fisher’s ownership of the A’s marks an unfortunate continuation of lackluster A’s owners. While all MLB team owners are evil in one way or another, the history of A’s owners includes two of the most important men in the history of the sport—Connie Mack and Charles Finley. Mack was the first owner of the A’s, following one of the most successful careers in the game. He played professionally and managed before becoming an owner. He currently holds the record for the most games managed in MLB history having managed the Philadelphia A’s from 1901 through 1950, and fittingly has both the most wins and losses of any skipper in the game. He won five World Series and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937, which was the second induction class. The only people that predate Mack in the Hall of Fame are Honus Wagner, Babe Ruth, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and Ty Cobb, often considered to be five of the greatest baseball players ever (though your humble blog host disagrees). Finley is a legend is his own right, and I would recommend giving his Wikipedia page a read to fully grasp his impact. He is most known for his marketing exploits, such as changing the color of baseballs, hiring MC Hammer as an executive, and offering players bonuses to grow moustaches.

In more recent years, the A’s are known most for being a cheap team, squeezing all of the money they can out of their fans and spending as little of it as possible on the on-field product and the stadium that they call home. The A’s are so cheap that many of you are probably familiar with a movie that they made about it, Moneyball. While many baseball fans love that movie, the truth of the matter is that the film is a glorification of greed, penny-pinching, and vulture capitalism. The team was driven to be the most efficient baseball machine it could be and mathematicians and consultants were roped into the effort. It was the Amazon Warehouse of MLB. Maximizing profit and outcomes while paying players as little as they could. For those of you who think that all MLB players are millionaires, check out this article written by Travis Sawchik, if you don’t want to read it, the biggest takeaway is that the median career earnings of 1,453 players to accrue at least one day of service time in 2019 was just $357,718. That is a little less that 10 years of the average income in the United States. It’s still a lot of money, but it is not enough to live off of for the rest of their lives. John Fisher, on the other hand, is worth approximately $2.4 billion, which leaves him just short of the 400 wealthiest people in America, yet he runs his baseball team on a shoestring budget. Why? Because he’s a greedy little weasel, just like many other owners of professional sports teams. While the A’s of the early 2000s popularized this trend of cutting costs, John Fisher took it to a new level.

Since he took over in 2005, the A’s have had one of the lowest payrolls in baseball every year. He has traded away all of the team’s best players, allowed his own ballpark to fall into a state of disrepair, begged taxpayers for billions to build a new one, and finally, when he didn’t get what he wanted, announced that he was moving the team to Las Vegas. For some reading, that might not feel like that big of a deal. But let’s look at a few examples of how this petty tyrant has ruined one of the most storied franchises in the sport.

The 2022 season saw five (!!!!) excellent examples of the A’s doing everything they could to save money by making their team worse. Matt Chapman, a fantastic fielding third baseman known most for consistency and a comfortably above average bat was traded to the Blue Jays before the 2022 season for four players that I have never heard of. Just so they wouldn’t have to pay him. Across the diamond, they had another Matt, Matt Olson, a first baseman who is a regular All-Star, Gold Glover, and MVP candidate. He was traded to the Braves ahead of the 2022 season for another four-player return. This trade was barely better, as the A’s did at least get a starting catcher out of it. Olson is one of the most feared power hitters in the game and has been excellent for the Atlanta Braves. None of the players in either of these trades even come close to making up for the departures of the Matts. Worse still, the A’s shortstop in 2022 was Elvis Andrus. Then a 33 year-old veteran of 13 years in MLB had played well in 106 games for the A’s and was making $14 million—low for a good starting shortstop, but far too much for the A’s. Oakland acquired Andrus by trading away two young stars in Khris Davis and Jonah Heim—the latter of which became a critical piece in the Ranger’s World Series win last season. They knew what they had to pay him, he was signed to a contract that the A’s had to honor when they acquired him. Part of that contract included a clause that would have granted him a $15 million salary in the next season if he reached 550 plate appearances in 2022. In late August, Andrus sat at 386 plate appearances, on pace to hit the 550 mark with room to spare. Since the trade deadline had passed and the A’s couldn’t ship him out to another team for a bag of peanuts and half of a soft pretzel, they cut him (for non-baseball heads, they fired him, dismissing him from the team and denying him the ability for his contract option to vest, and denying him the continued income from his contract). If that wasn’t enough, that move came at the end of a week where they also cut Jed Lowrie and Stephen Piscotty, two long-standing A’s. Cutting veterans allowed the team to pull up younger players who are not guaranteed the same salary due to the MLB’s collective bargaining agreement. It is important to remember that John Fisher is a billionaire. Not a millionaire, he’s worth about 2,400 times more than someone who has $1 million. So, when he cuts payroll it is not because he has to. He wants to.

Yes, that is what you think it is. 

Fisher, a faux-frugalist, also claimed that the Coliseum was in a constant state of disrepair. And on that count he was right. The urinals leaked onto the floor, sewage would fill the dugouts if it rained, and a family of feral cats joined a possum as the stadium’s only permanent residents. But, a reminder, Fisher is a billionaire and the A’s certainly had the money to fix the stadium. But instead he tried to reach his hands into the pockets of the taxpayers in the city, asking them to finance a new stadium for him and his failing franchise. The City of Oakland cares so deeply about the A’s that they were willing to invest some money in a new stadium for the team despite massive budget shortfalls. It is important to remember that the people of the city love the A’s. A telling chart provided by Baseball Reference shows you that the A’s still put up respectable attendance numbers as late as 2019, just a few years ago! They lost almost 1 million fans in one year following their 2021 announcement that they were leaving the Bay for Las Vegas.

At the end of this saga, John Fisher is standing in the ruins of the Oakland A’s, pointing fingers at the city and worse, the fans, for their inability to spend enough money for him to keep his franchise in Oakland. In a page-long letter to his team’s fans, he apologizes that he failed to keep the team in the Bay Area and says that he wishes he could speak to each of his fans personally. If that were true, then why would the A’s turn off replies and comments on all of their social media posts? If that were true, then why weren’t you in the crowd with the fans throughout the last season? John Fisher stripped the team down to the bone and let its stadium rot in the northern California sun to manufacture an environment deeply unfriendly to fans. He put together a terrible product and packaged it in a stadium that was falling apart around the dedicated few who continued to suffer through his tantrum. For those of you who are fans of the Netflix show, I Think You Should Leave, John Fisher is effectively MLB’s version of this skit:

Arguably the worst of this situation is that they don’t even have to leave Oakland yet. There is no stadium waiting for them in Las Vegas. As of the writing of this entry, there isn’t even a plan to build a stadium. All we know is that John Fisher wants the city to spend $1.5 billion for him because he is unwilling to invest even a dollar in the fans that have invested hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in his team. The A’s aren’t going to Las Vegas next year, they’re going to Sacramento to play in a stadium that was never intended to house a Major League Baseball team. We have no idea how long they may have to play in Sacramento. There is no reason for them to leave the Coliseum this year. Even if the ownership is dead-set on leaving Oakland, and it appears they are, they could still stay in the Coliseum until their new billion-dollar-convection-oven of a stadium is built in the desert.

As I watched the game on Thursday, the camera crews panned around the stadium. I spent three hours watching the A’s win their final game in Oakland while adults and children wept over the loss of their team. To a lot of people, baseball is just a sport. To many of us, though, it is far more than that. It is how we grew up spending summers with our friends, our parents, or strangers in the stands that become your best friend for 9 innings while you cheered on your favorite players. Nearly 50,000 fans sold out the Coliseum to watch the end of their team. Fans that Fisher claimed were unwilling to spend money to watch the A’s. It has nothing to do with the A’s, and everything to do with their greedy owner. No one wants to give money to a person who is going to take away the very thing that they are paying money to watch. The Coliseum housed generations of A’s fans. And on Thursday we watched that end. It would be sad if this had to happen. It’s feels gross that the whole spectacle was unnecessary.

Long after the game ended, fans hung around as members of the grounds crew handed them cups and water bottles full of the dirt from the infield and the warning track. For some of those people, that dirt will be the last memory of summers they spent with their dad in the hot sun, eating hot dogs and watching their favorite players. Those memories are everything to some people, if you haven’t read the first post I made on this blog, I would recommend checking it out if you don’t believe me. I would also suggest reading this wonderful retrospective put together by FanGraphs, the best baseball website in the game. Some of my most cherished memories involve sitting in uncomfortable seats at Fenway Park with my dad, just watching some guys play a game. But we shared that experience. Just like millions of A’s fans have for the last six decades.

John Fisher is robbing A’s fans of their team, tainting their memories with the bitter taste of an owner who doesn’t give a shit about the people that made it possible for him to ever ask a city for $1.5 billion. This is a disgrace and a mark on the other 29 owners and the institution of MLB. Fandom means a lot to a lot of people. If money is so important to Mr. Fisher, maybe he should sell the team to someone who actually cares about the people and the city that have made the team as successful as it has been. Then he can have his billions and leave the rest of us alone. Fans of the A’s deserve better than what he has given them as owner. I hope that this isn’t the end of baseball in Oakland. And I hope that MLB learns something about letting idiots like Fisher own baseball teams—though none of us should hold our breath.

Introducing A Blog About Baseball

First of all, if you’re reading this, you’re likely either my dad, my girlfriend or one of my closest friends. For your support, I want to thank you, it means a lot to me that you would read—or at least click on—my silly little baseball blog. I know that y’all (with the exception of my dad and one or two of my friends) are not the biggest fans of baseball, but I hope that you find something entertaining in this project. If you know me, you know that I love this sport. I love it at every level. Little League to MLB and every level and every country that makes up this game.

In this post, I want to talk about the “why” of this project, and also give you a preview of some of the things that I plan to write about. Baseball is something that I share with the most important person in my life, my dad. But it is also a chess match, a display of incredible power and speed, a delivery vehicle for stories that have shaped history, and something that is also just silly and fun. I hope you enjoy taking this journey with me, let’s have some fun and talk about baseball. I want to make this an accessible blog for people at any level of baseball fandom. There will definitely be discussion of advanced metrics and maybe a few statistical deep dives, but I hope to communicate everything in a way that makes sense to those of us who don’t listen to every episode of Effectively Wild while creating our own ridiculous leaderboards on StatHead.

I decided to start this blog because my relationship with baseball has meant a lot to me throughout my life. It was a bond first forged with my dad in our rectangular side yard where he threw me tens of thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of pitches. It wasn’t exactly a fair matchup, he lobbed tennis balls to me while I crushed pitches with a metal tee ball bat. His ERA was probably in the hundreds, but those are the most cherished memories that I have.

Like many of us, my dad is the one who I have to thank most for my love of the game. He is the most important person in my life and has been the most influential force in everything I do. From our early days in the yard, he went on to coach my Little League and Babe Ruth teams, including All-Stars in the summer, and fall ball afterwards. One of my core memories involves a fall ball game where I grew up in Connecticut, it must have been about 25 degrees in late October. After passing me handwarmers and keeping me supplied with hot chocolate from the snack bar, he took me to Five Guys after the game and I remember sitting in the car holding the warm bag tightly to try and defrost my hands and bring some warmth back into my body. I couldn’t tell you who won the game. I couldn’t even tell you what position I played. I can tell you that I had fun and that my dad was there with me.

When I played high school baseball, my dad managed to make it to every single game despite being a single father with two kids playing spring sports. When I played travel ball in the summer it was the same, he was at every game recording every plate appearance so we could watch it back after the game. Even this year, we trekked up to Cooperstown to visit the Hall of Fame and went to a Yankees Dodgers game for his birthday. Every time we talk on the phone, one of the first topics we cover is whatever the topic du jour is in MLB news.

Baseball is a great sport, the mechanics of the game are interesting and entertaining. But it’s also a story telling device. Whether it is the story of my dad and I’s relationship, or that of labor strife in America, or the fight for equal rights for Black, Asian, and Latino people here in the United States. These stories still aren’t over either, Black participation in baseball has been steadily declining. We still have not had an openly gay player in the majors. And it is still a cis-male dominated sport. Religious differences? Baseball has that in spades, just ask the Dodgers how their Pride Night went last year. Baseball is a microcosm of every part of American life, politically, economically, and socially, we as a nation are reflected in the sport. Our warts, our flaws, but also the best parts of us.

The economics of the game impact us as fans in ways deeper than we are often willing to reconcile with. The A’s departure from Oakland due in large part to a greedy owner who is little more than a caricature of a trust fund baby is a great example but so is the systematic disinvestment and contraction of the minor leagues. Growing up, we couldn’t afford more than one or two games per year at our closest MLB teams—the Yankees and the Red Sox—because they charge extortionist prices. What we did have, though, was a healthy MiLB ecosystem. Just up the road from where I grew up, we had the Norwich Navigators, then the AA affiliate of the New York Yankees, and we saw many members of the dynastic Yankees make their way up through there, or make rehab starts there. I still have the bobbleheads from when Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, and Bernie Williams made trips through Norwich on their way off the injured list. After the Navigators, we had the Connecticut Defenders, the AA affiliate of the San Francisco Giants, in the years before they won three World Series in five years, the Defenders hosted the likes of Madison Bumgarner, Brian Wilson, Brandon Belt, and Travis Ishikawa (that’s for you baseball sickos). When they left for Richmond, the Connecticut Tigers, a short season A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, took over the stadium lease. While there weren’t a ton of big leaguers that came through there, we did get the New York Penn League All Star Game in 2013, and there were a fair few players who saw time in MLB. We were also a short drive from the AAA affiliate of the Red Sox in Pawtucket. My dad and I saw Mookie Betts and Aaron Judge play there long before they were perennial All Stars and MVP contenders. These teams brought baseball to our communities in a way that was affordable and accessible. They’re all gone now, and just the Hartford Yard Goats remain.

In this blog, I hope to bring all of these things together. I want to talk about the stories that make the game so compelling. Both those that highlight the athleticism of the greatest players ever, but also those of the unsung heroes of the game. I want to talk about my favorite players like Dick Allen, Dustin Pedroia, John Olerud, Rajai Davis, and Jesse Hahn. But I also want to talk about the stars of the game today, Shohei Ohtani has put together the best power/speed season in the history of the game and he isn’t even pitching! Aaron Judge is threatening a second 60 home run season, and he’s doing it by batting behind the second coming of Ted Williams in Juan Soto. Chris Sale has found the fountain of youth and we even saw the return of the knuckleball this year thanks to Matt Waldron. Jose Ramirez might sneak into the 40/40 club, joining Shohei. And the likely MVP runners up in Bobby Witt Jr. and Francisco Lindor have put up historic seasons that would go down as some of the most dominant if it weren’t for Ohtani and Judge breaking the scales. I’m also definitely going to write a post about Boof Bonser, obviously. I also want to talk about the ugly parts of the game, the exclusion of those baseball does not deem worthy, the control of ownership over labor, the massive heists that billionaires have pulled off over taxpayers to fund new stadiums and infrastructure projects, and the rampant bigotry that still finds a home in the clubhouses and stands in the game.

Baseball is awesome. Warts and all. I hope you come to see the sport the way I do. And if you don’t, that’s okay too. I hope I can teach you something interesting or that we can learn something new together. I really appreciate that you’ve chosen to spend some time with me reading about a silly little sport that I care too much about.